In Los Angeles, where I had fled from a life of making portrait heads in New York, I met the architect Richard Neutra, who suggested that I do a swimming pool for Josef von Sternberg for whom he was designing a house. A plaster model was made in the inner court of the Stendahl Gallery while I was also working on a head of Helen Gahagan. As part of the pool, water flows down a slope on which fat Von Sternberg could lie before jumping into this first lozenge-shaped pool.